1918 Montana patriots like Bush cheerleaders

By George McEvoy
Palm Beach Post Columnist

05/11/06 "Palm Beach Post" -- 05/06/06 -- Seventy-five men and three women were arrested in Montana and charged with sedition, with 41 of them sent to prison for terms of up to 20 years, for speaking out against the war.

No, they hadn't criticized our present effort in the Middle East. This all took place in 1918, and it stands as a brutal example of what can happen to a nation when patriotism runs amok.

Once the United States entered the First World War, anti-German feelings reached the boiling point. The federal government imprisoned aging labor leader Eugene Debs for daring to condemn our participation, and various states enacted myriad laws as politicians maneuvered to out-patriot each other.

Nowhere were the sedition laws more stringent, nor enforced with as much vigor, as in Montana, home to many residents of German descent.

According to The New York Times, Montana's legislators made it a crime to say or publish anything "disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous or abusive'' about the government, soldiers or the American flag. The bill was passed unanimously in February 1918. It expired when the war ended.

The law also made it illegal to speak German.

And decades before the Nazis staged public book burnings, the Montana law banned all books written in German.

Local groups called "Third Degree Committees'' sprang up throughout the state, taking it upon themselves to search out people who did not buy Liberty Bonds, the forerunners of the Victory Bonds of the Second World War.

For decades, the subject of the sedition laws had been all but forgotten in Montana, but then Clemens Work, director of graduate studies at the University of Montana School of Journalism, wrote a book titled Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West. After reading the book, Jeffrey Renz, a law professor at the University of Montana, assigned his criminal law students to find descendants of the convicted people and to research the law.

A petition then was sent to Gov. Brian Schweitzer, and on Wednesday, he posthumously pardoned all of those convicted under the 1918 law. The governor himself is a descendant of ethnic Germans who migrated to Montana from Russia in 1909.

The stories told by other descendants ranged from the outright cruel to the comically tragic. In one case, a traveling salesman passing through Montana happened to remark that he considered wartime food regulations "a big joke.'' He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a term of seven to 20 years.

Apparently, a number of people were convicted on the word of one person, Eberhard Von Waldru, an undercover agent for the prosecutor in Helena, the state capital. Of German ancestry himself, he would go into beer halls, strike up a conversation about the war and try to catch people saying something that could be deemed seditious. He testified against eight defendants. All were convicted, and four went to prison.

Mr. Work said he found eerie similarities between the year 2001, right after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the behavior of the people in Montana in 1918.

"The hair on the back of my neck stood up,'' he said. The rhetoric was so similar, from the demonization of the enemy to saying "either you're with us or against us" to the hasty passage of laws.

In 1918, it was reported that gangs roamed the state, forcing people to kiss the American flag. Those who refused might be beaten or tarred and feathered.

Neighbors were urged to inform on their neighbors if they heard them say anything that might be construed as seditious.

And this all was done in the name of patriotism.

George McEvoy is a columnist for The Palm Beach Post. His e-mail address is george_mcevoy@pbpost.com

Copyright © 2006, The Palm Beach Post.

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